Three military buildings and a road in Discovery Park are scheduled to be demolished using money from the Shoreline Park Improvement Fund.
The fund was the result of a multi-million-dollar settlement with King County over the 1991 expansion of the West Point sewer plant in the park. Of that money, $5 million was earmarked for Discovery Park, and the biggest upcoming project is the demolition of the so-called Nike building.
Seattle Parks and Recreation has budgeted $1 million for the job. There's a reason it will cost so much, noted project manager Garrett Farrell at a June 24 public meeting.
A legacy of the Cold War, the Nike building was the command bunker for batteries of anti-ballistic missiles in the Puget Sound area, and it was built to withstand "an indirect hit from a thermo-nuclear bomb," he said at the meeting.
In fact, tearing down other such bunkers in the country has proven to be so difficult that the Pentagon has documented their demolition, Farrell said.
Helping matters, he's been able to find the plans for the Discovery Park bunker, but not all demolition companies are up to the task, Farrell explained. "We're going to pre-qualify contractors," he said of companies on an "A" list and companies at the top of a "B" list. Parks plans to ask for bids on the project within a month.
Most of the asbestos in the building has been abated, and metal thieves have taken care of stripping the building of most if not all of its copper wiring, he conceded.
That was despite the parks department welding all but one door shut and installing a motion-sensor burglar alarm, Farrell said. The thieves used power in the building to saw through the welded doors, and they disabled and stole the burglar alarm, he went on to say.
On the flip side, tanks meant to hold a quarter-million gallons of drinkable water were salvaged from the Nike building and sold for around $50,000, according to Farrell.
Further complicating the process, the Nike building is holding up the California Avenue updated, he said. Handling that problem ties into a $250,000 project to demolish a building near the radar antenna by the officers' quarters in the park.
The building once held computer equipment for an array of radar antennas linked to the Nike command center, and debris from that building will be added to rubble from the Nike site to shore up California Avenue, Farrell said.
Once that's done, five feet of material mixed with sand recovered from a landslide at the Japanese Gardens will be layered over the top, he said.
The original plan calls for restoring the two sites to natural conditions, but whether that happens remains to be seen. "I think the votes out on that," Farrell explained. "It's tied to how much money we have left." At the very least, the Nike site will be heavily hydro-seeded before the rainy season to prevent erosion, he added.
Also scheduled for demolition is the Navy's PX in the park. But there's no money for that job right now, nor is there money to take out some buildings and a parking lot near the Navy's Capehart housing.
The parks department is also in the process of starting design work on a $300,000 project to remove the North Forest Road, which stretches from near military housing to Discovery Park's north parking lot.
It's possible asphalt from the road could be hauled away for free by a company that would recycle it, but taking out the road base could prove troublesome, according to Farrell.
Preliminary core drilling on the road has revealed that it was poorly graded and that differently sized rocks and gravel were used for the base, he said. "We don't have a lot of answers yet."
Another $600,000 has been budgeted for efforts to restore the West Point Lighthouse. It could cost more. "It wasn't really well maintained when we got it," said Farrell, who added that the parks department is trying to do an assessment of the project's needs.
A Tacoma architect who has restored 13 other lighthouses in Washington state has been tapped to come up with a restoration plan, Farrell said.
But coming up with the cash to restore the aging building to the point it can be occupied or host visitors will take even more money. "It's going to be a little ways off," he said.
Staff reporter Russ Zabel can be reached at rzabel@nwlink.com or 461-1309.
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